Tuesday, February 06, 2007

All quiet on the comment front

It's been mighty quiet around here in the comments lately... has everyone gone on vacation? =)

And also, can someone explain to me how I ended up with 90 e-mails that need to be answered, all residing in my inbox? Does anyone out there have a good method for going through lots and lots of e-mail? I tend to feel like I'm slogging through it and not making much progress. Any and all suggestions/tips are welcome!

If you use Outlook, you can create rules by right clicking any e-mail and going through the Wizard to delete it, flag it and send it to a particular folder based on priority for you.

I'm a big fan of parsing my e-mails as they come in. I use the flags in Outlook as a prioritization system. High priority items (must dos) are flagged in red, secondary priorities (nice to dos) are flagged in blue), information is yellow, etc. I then sort my inbox by flag so the high priority red items are on top and get my first attention. This way, as I work my way through my e-mails, they are already sorted by priority so I get all the must dos done and most of the nice to dos that I can.

There's the e-mail reset approach. When the in-box gets out of hand, just reply to everything with a note saying that you're deleting everything and if it's really importatnt, they should re-send. I've gotten a bit lax on this and I have 45 messages in my in-box, but I try to keep myself down to under 18 (what fits in my mail window without scrolling) at any one time.

How did you end up with 90 emails? Probably you took your eye off the ball for five minutes!

What works for me is to do some of the new emails and some of the backlog. If you only do the backlog, the new ones pile up and become a new backlog. If you only do the new ones, the backlog gets older and a heavier weight of guilt on your mind. A mix of both will gradually get the situation back under control.

Hmm, email. Well, in gmail you can go up to "create a filter", write my email address in the "from" area. Then click next. Then you put "star it" in what to do with that. And tell it okay.

After that, when your inbox gets full, it's simply a matter of clicking select unstarred, and the delete button. That way, the only emails remaining are the starred ones. Clearly, if they have stars, they are the most important.

I confess, I work with a client list of my own (accounting) and when the email gets too overwhelming, I put on my 'out of office' message. It doesn't help with the email coming in, but I feel less pressure to answer RIGHT AWAY RIGHT AWAY DANG IT I NEED AN ANSWER NOW RIGHT AWAY.

Because, you know, clients are SO patient. :)

As for comments, I contribute it to January being El Sucko, and we're all still recovering. At least, that's what I'm going with.

I have multiple email addresses, and they're all forwarded to my main one. As they come in, they're flagged (contest emails, chapter emails, review emails, work emails, family emails, crit partner emails, etc) by gmail filters based on either the TO: or the From: line. I can sit and go through all my emails by category, so I'm not jumping around from one line of thought to another.

Between doing my 8-5 prep for tax time (arugh!), everyday housework, and revising my ms, haven't had much time for anything beside lurking. Maybe once tax season is over I'll be able to breathe. But I do lurk religiously. (Sneak in between company closings.)

Hello wonderful commentors! Thanks for all your e-mail suggestions... today is now officially known as "Jenny tries to conquer e-mail" day. It's almost 9:30am now; let's see how far I can get using all your suggestions. =)

I would be more active, but just after I sent my manuscript sample to you, my grandmother passed away.

Death in real life sucks. It's so much easier to deal with on the printed page.

I'd use outlook rules to filter into specific folders based on keywords. Or you can use a software that I am developing for Agents *big grin* that eliminates the email conundrum entirely. (let's chat offline about that. Please contact me if you'd like to know more)